Yates: A Welcome End To Prosecutorial 'Fishing' Expedition

Law360, New York (February 26, 2015, 2:50 PM EST) -- In this week's ruling in Yates v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court put an appropriate end to the government's efforts to expand the Sarbanes-Oxley Act's so-called "anti-shredding" provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1519, far beyond the conduct that Sarbanes-Oxley was designed to address. Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted in response to a massive accounting fraud at Enron, and the concern that Enron's outside auditor had destroyed incriminating documents. The Yates case involved nothing close to either corporate misconduct or document destruction — rather, John Yates, a commercial fisherman, was convicted of ordering his crew to toss overboard a number of undersized fish a deputized federal officer had identified in Yates' catch....

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